Reading the articles in the current Cambridge University Libraries Information Bulletin (CULIB) about open access, journals and the DSpace@Cambridge project started me off on this whole subject of access to academic research.
You will probably not have heard of the University’s very own institutional repository: DSpace@Cambridge. Or, indeed, of institutional repositories at all! I will attempt a brief and hopefully clear explanation of what they are and why they are important to you.
Basically, institutional repositories (IRs), besides being a mouthful and tricky to type, are digital storage areas freely accessible to anyone online. Although anything that can be digitized can be placed in the repositories, current interest is about research staff posting copies of their journal-published articles in their repository. Over 90% of peer-reviwed academic journals now allow researchers to post a copy of their published articles in their institution’s repository: so-called ’self-archiving’. In some cases this is the ‘pre-print’ which can link to any later revisions, in other cases the final peer-reviewed version.
Because the repositories are freely accessible online, the exciting implication of self-archiving in repositories is that almost any research article published can be freely available online via the author’s institutional repository. This is known as ‘open access’ (OA): all would-be users can access any research article irrespective of whether their own institution can afford to subscribe to the journal they were published in.
Like Cambridge University, most academic institutions have set up repositories. The main problem now seems to be getting staff to place material in them - especially getting them to self-archive all their published research articles. For example, most of the stuff currently in DSpace@Cambridge is archival records - there are very few currently published research articles. In future, it may be made a condition of funding that all Research Council UK (RCUK) funded research must be self-archived by the author in the institution’s repository.
Indeed, the UK government House of Commons Science and Technology Committee investigated the whole area of access to research published in science technology and medical (STM) journals. Their report, Scientific publications: free for all?, was published in July. It advised the government to oblige UK authors to publish all research in their institutions’ websites or repositories.
Many specialist search engines are available, designed to search for articles in repositories across institutions worldwide. For example, OAIster, one of the most comprehensive, now indexes over 3.7m records across 363 institutions, and there are smaller experimental OA citation databases such as citebase search. Our Library User and Resource Guide will be covering open access, institutional repositories and IR search engines in the next edition available in January 2005. The wonderful thing about a search engine such as OAIster is that every single search result is freely accessible online with no restrictions! Others such as Elsevier’s Scirus scientific search engine covers some repositories as, indeed does Yahoo! Search (by collaborating with OAIster) and Google, especially its new Google Scholar offshoot (see previous item below).